Zainuri Kamaruddin

Zainuri Kamaruddin (1966-13 January 2017) was a leader of the Islamic State's Malaysian foreign fighters during the Syrian Civil War.

Biograph y
Zainuri Kamaruddin was born in Bota, northern Malaysia in 1966, and he studied at Abu Bakar Islamic University in Karachi, Pakistan. Kamaruddin joined several other Malaysian jihadists in heading for neighboring Afghanistan to join the Mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War, fighting against the Afghan communist government. After fighting at Jalalabad and other locales, Kamaruddin returned home to become a technician, and he plotted terrorist attacks in his homeland during the 1990s in hopes of creating an Islamist government in Southeast Asia. Kamaruddin became a member of Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia, taking part in robberies and the planning of terrorist attacks and assassinations. In 2004, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for robbery, and he was released in 2014; in April, he decided to head to Syria to join Ajnad al-Sham, later joining the Islamic State. He helped in training child soldiers for IS and with recruiting foreign fighters for the cause, and he promised that the Malay Archipelago would one day be swarming with IS fighters who would bring the fight to Malaysia and Indonesia. In May 2016, after Kamaruddin burnt his Malaysian passport, Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia Ahmad Zahid Hamidi declared him "Public Enemy No. 1". On 13 January 2017, he was killed in a US Air Force airstrike on Raqqa, Raqqa Governorate, Syria alongside two fellow Malaysian fighters.